An expanded cinema performance featuring distorted, hand-painted 16mm found footage with choreographed action between two binary opposed performers. “Shit Sling” visually appropriates the colloquial idiom that if you throw shit at someone, you can call them dirty. Excerpts from two films, Julie (1975) and an Untitled British newsreel to the Antipodes (circa 1950s), were intercut with increasing frequency and projected directly onto the performers. Exploring concepts of classical conditioning, neuro-lingusitic programming and imperial brutality (British Raj), the action embodies the emotional menace and calculating manipulation required to ensure that specific paradigms of thought remain dominant.

The white performer exposes the black performer to this conditioning by attacking him with white paint—shit sling. Subsequent whitewashing of the black performer and surrounding background creates a projection surface for which the handmade film becomes visible. Heavily affected optical sound from the film creates a powerful, rhythmic soundtrack evocative of the inner rumblings of some giant industrial machine. Ultimately, the black performer is covered in white paint and thus becomes effectively conditioned. He takes the brush himself and paints the only unaffected surface of himself—his face, before erasing his shadow from the painted screen.

Performance duration 17:18.